One Bowl of Rice

“What is 'truth'? What is 'falsehood'? Whatever gives wings to men, whatever produces great works and great souls and lifts us a man's height above the earth - that is true. Whatever clips off man's wings - that is false." Paul
“The Last Temptation of Christ” Nikos Kazanzakis

There is a particular kind of dream which I have spontaneously sometimes, though it can be learned. Its properly referred to as a “lucid dream” and even forms an important component of Tibetan yoga and Native American sorcery. It is a form of dreaming often associated with astral projection, which if I had it all to do over again is one of those things I would have studied. A lucid dream is simply a dream in which the sleeper wakes within the dream and realizes he is asleep and dreaming. Think about what that means. If you’ve never had a lucid dream, it’s a wonderful situation to be in. Because it’s a dream there are no consequences to anything you do. You are the master of your universe, and can experiment harmlessly with any experience you might be curious about before you awake, even things that are impossible. You can feel pain and pleasure too.

See, I had this dream once. I woke up in my dream in downtown Panama City. There weren’t many people around and I realized I was dreaming. I had the whole universe to myself. A beautiful latina woman came jiggling down the sidewalk towards me. I swept her up into my arms and grabbing her breast in my hand, gave her a passionate kiss.

She shoved me into a building and punched me in the face hard enough to hurt.

While I held my stinging lip, she yelled at me. “Just because you’re dreaming doesn’t mean you can do anything you want!”

True story.

So, that’s about it. When it comes to love and lust, that sort of sums up my life experience in a nutshell. Sorry lady. Thought this was my dream.

I came into this world hungry, an intensely passionate and romantic soul. I was determined to be a lover and saint, carnal and transcendent. I find myself a middle aged frightened civil servant. What the hell happened to me?

I searched for God and quickly found religion instead. I think the biggest mistake I made, the one I steer my son away from, was not trusting my own passions, my own instincts. Allowing my life to be micro managed by others on the belief they knew more than I did. I did not find great love or great lust that way. I did not find God.

I think, if God exists in any way that matters, God is a lover of passionate souls, souls of great love and lust. Not necessarily pure or morally correct souls. The great figures of the world’s religions, were not the pious men and women, but the strong ones, the ones filled with great passion who sometimes made the most foolish mistakes. I think what God dislikes is the cowardly soul.

So there is this life, where now even in my dreams I get slapped. There is this inner solitude. What to do?

Freud observed that people do not fantasize about what they already have. They fantasize about what they covet and do not have. A man doesn’t fantasize great rough sex with his wife so much as with the stranger at the grocery store. I’ve done a lot of fasting in my time. I’ve fasted seven days on water alone twice. After the second day, you stop being hungry. Food becomes irrelevant. It’s really not that hard. I knew people who did forty days, like Jesus. The worst fast, the most difficult, is to eat one small bowl of rice every day and nothing more. Then the body doesn’t forget about food, it longs for it. You’ll fantasize about food the way a famine victim does, which is to say all the time. You won’t last three days before your will breaks down and your body seduces you into breaking your pledge.

A life where love and lust are sparse, and where God is only a painful disillusionment is like that one bowl of rice. You think about those things all the time. You’re never allowed to forget what you have only a little of. That’s when you become a writer of erotic stories.

I think the potentially most interesting writing, even if not always the most competent, comes from the bent up souls, the exiles. These are the people on the outside, who are obessed with certain ideas, whose former treasures are now guarded by fierce and resentful demons.

Then the writing isn’t about money. Its the exploration of obesession, the person questioning the things that can be denounced, or given up on, but never abandoned. It’s the lucid dream pinned to paper like a bug under a display case, labeled, defined but not yet understood and therefore magical, accessable only by sorcery, the invocation of magic words. I think erotica was a natural calling for me. Most of my stories are junk, I admit it freely, but no - not all of them. The good ones, and everybody who tries hard gets to have a few good ones, are the ones where I conjure the old angry ghosts, where the characters have difficult sex and are tormented by spiritual quandaries. I don’t write BDSM, I don’t even know how. But my best characters are tormented on the rack just the same.

It would be interesting, if it were possible, to know how many writers of erotica and romance have excellent and satisfying love lives. How many of them get to fuck all they want? How many feel greatly loved just as they are? I’ll bet the number would be few.

Some of us who write about love and lust, our calling is be obsessed with the one bowl of rice, to be filled with ghosts of what we covet. Its how we work out our particular curses. And once obsessed and driven a little mad – to dream.




Fiction By C. Sanchez-Garcia
http://csanchezgarcia.blogspot.com/
http://www.myspace.com/csanchez_garcia